One warning about CitiesXL (of any flavor): it has a major memory leak that tends to cause major slowdowns at around an hour of play. It also doesn't support multithreading of any sort, which is less of an impact but makes it more difficult to work around the memory slowdowns.

That's largely a result of the game's developer having been out of business for some time; 2012 and Platinum were just hacked together by the publisher throwing in a few new buildings using the mod tools.

scottydoesntknow:"Due to the high demand for SimCity, Origin has experienced some delays that have impacted a small percentage of users. The team has been working non-stop to resolve. We are also making changes to prevent further issues, and we're confident that the Origin service will be stable for our International SimCity launches later this week."

I hate this farking excuse. Every time this happens they basically blame the fans. "If so many of y'all hadn't purchased it, everything would be working fine." Pre-orders alone should've given them some clue it was going to be big.

Even the game's solo, private sandbox mode requires an online connection, which many critics see as EA's attempt to bake anti-piracy digital rights management (DRM) into the game, even as EA designers have maintained that the always-online requirement is more of a design choice that persistently connects fans to a global SimCity marketplace and to new game-wide challenges.

You go to hell EA. You got to hell and you die!

Small number of users my ass. My hubby can barely play the game!

/bought it before I could convince him otherwise.//Hated simcity 4 apparently.

StrangeQ:Bullseyed: Despite the problems (and there are a ton) I played SimCity last night on my girlfriend's computer. I was pissed off enough about server issues that I told her I didn't even want to try it, but when it finally came online 4 hours later I played and it was pretty fun. Probably worth about $40, so I'm still debating at $60.

On that topic, I think any time a game has server stabilty problems like this, the company should be forced to refund 25%, 33% or 50% of the price back to every single person who bought the game. Suddenly this problem wouldn't exist anymore.

yeah, but see that would require consumer protection laws to actually be effective or for those affected to actually make a concerted effort to get results.

scottydoesntknow:lucksi: It's sad to see that they still sold so many copies of this DRM ridden crapfest of a game

That seems to be the standard MO now. Release an unfinished, buggy, error-filled game and then see the reaction. If it's hugely negative, release a few quick updates to patch some parts and see how much outrage remains. If it subsides, great you've got all their money and don't have to do shiat past that. If it continues, release another update that fixes a couple more of the glaring issues, then call it done.

And yet for some reason people still buy them. I haven't bought any new games in years because I just don't want to put with that shiat. And it's not because I don't enjoy playing games...I still play all my older titles fairly frequently. I just don't like being told how, when and where I can play them. Games are supposed to be for fun and relaxation, not exercises in jumping through hoops for some farking corporation.

I'm guessing the server problems are intentional, because it gave them lots of free advertising about the newly released game (it's on every blog/social website for past 3 days?).They know people will still buy the game anyways (now or within a month, whenever server problems fixed), and making sure everyone knows there is a new game to buy is more important than having the server up for a couple days.What, are people going to get a refund after they bought it? Not likely.

RoxtarRyan:Why would anyone pay $60 to rent a game? It is only as good as the jackasses who run the servers (and damn near every launch of an "always on" game has shown the people who run them are quite incapable of doing their jobs), and they can shut them off anytime they want to for any reason.

That's why I never bought Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, this game, or any other POS like that. Maybe one day companies like Blizzard and EA will learn, but only after they get their headquarters burned to the ground because the servers got hacked or whatever else and people couldn't play their shiat.

Amen. If it's essentially a single-user game or a game that can have multi-user via local lans (or vlans), but they throw in that stupid always-on crap, I won't buy it. Despite being smack in the center of their target demographic (likes gaming, has time to spend on gaming, has money to spend on games, and has an understanding spouse who doesn't get on his case about gaming).

About the only thing I care about now from EA is Need for Speed, and they've spent most of the last 10 years trying to skullfark that series into an undeserved grave. Criterion's done good with their at-bats (Most Wanted 2012 just got some AWESOME DLC), but I know it's only a matter of time before the head office throws up some obscenely unrealistic deadline that they can't fulfill without compromising the quality. They've done it with every one of their games, including Battlefield, and it's going to happen to this series. FARK: Again, to boot.

I think we're going to get to the point in gaming, and computing in general, where things are going to be less and less done on the end-user's side. So far, this is happening in terms of storage (cloud storage), streaming media (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc), office productivity (Google Documents, MS Skydrive, etc), more and more workplaces giving teleworkers and in-office workers thin clients to log into Virtual Machines and Citrix Xenapp environments, and it seems as a lot of recent generation of games require an "always online" connection in order to even play single player. A lot of cell phone telephones are ditching the SD card, instead having users stream their media, and that trend appears to also be moving to laptops and tablets as well, with Chromebooks and the ultra-thin laptops having less and less HD space.

It just seems like consumer-grade technology is trying to pull itself away from having the end users do everything themselves, and moving to an "a la carte" style of computing.

After having spent most of yesterday dealing with a program-crashing error on Adobe Creative Suite that was 99.9% likely caused by some form of online program registration confirmation snafu, I am particularly galled by the "always on" requirement for functions that shouldn't ever have to connect to the internet.

Hack Patooey:Theaetetus: As a result of all of the negative reviews of SimCity, I picked up Cities XL 2012 yesterday. Not bad. Huge maps, single player but you can tie your cities together and trade between them, curved roads. So suck it, EA.

I was pondering this myself. Cities XL Platinum is $30 on Steam right now.

Picked it up for £3 ($5) last month on Steam, but that might have been a deal if you already have one of the earlier versions.

RoxtarRyan:I think we're going to get to the point in gaming, and computing in general, where things are going to be less and less done on the end-user's side. So far, this is happening in terms of storage (cloud storage), streaming media (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc), office productivity (Google Documents, MS Skydrive, etc), more and more workplaces giving teleworkers and in-office workers thin clients to log into Virtual Machines and Citrix Xenapp environments, and it seems as a lot of recent generation of games require an "always online" connection in order to even play single player. A lot of cell phone telephones are ditching the SD card, instead having users stream their media, and that trend appears to also be moving to laptops and tablets as well, with Chromebooks and the ultra-thin laptops having less and less HD space.

It just seems like consumer-grade technology is trying to pull itself away from having the end users do everything themselves, and moving to an "a la carte" style of computing.

You are not wrong.I work for a major player in the world of Computing and their vision is that enterprise business will be 100% cloud based with in 5 to 10 years."Let us do everything for you."That sounds all well and good until there is an issue with connections, security and who actually owns the intellectual property that resides on "our" servers.

gods I hate Steam. I had a five hour flight with an empty seat next to me and I thought, "time for a little XCom." Nope, no internet connection and Steam seemed to think I needed one to verify my Steam account before I could play the game installed on my system with the DVD in the drive.

now if i play offline there is about a 50-50 chance if Steam will let me play. I don't care if the next game is so fun it is more addictive than the one that braiwashed everyone in the ST:TNG episode. If it requires a Steam account it stays on the shelf.

You go to hell Steam. You go to hell, die and go to double-bad hell.

I never had issues playing steam games offline on my laptop while onboard the ship underway when I was in the Navy.

Space Station Wagon:I work for a major player in the world of Computing and their vision is that enterprise business will be 100% cloud based with in 5 to 10 years.

That seems so bizarre to me. We're getting to the point where your average desktop has some SERIOUS horsepower, so what we're going to do is offload most of the serious calculations to a remote location and make BANDWIDTH (the one thing that is still relatively expensive and in far shorter supply than raw computing power) the limiting factor?

RoxtarRyan:I think we're going to get to the point in gaming, and computing in general, where things are going to be less and less done on the end-user's side. So far, this is happening in terms of storage (cloud storage), streaming media (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc), office productivity (Google Documents, MS Skydrive, etc), more and more workplaces giving teleworkers and in-office workers thin clients to log into Virtual Machines and Citrix Xenapp environments, and it seems as a lot of recent generation of games require an "always online" connection in order to even play single player. A lot of cell phone telephones are ditching the SD card, instead having users stream their media, and that trend appears to also be moving to laptops and tablets as well, with Chromebooks and the ultra-thin laptops having less and less HD space.

It just seems like consumer-grade technology is trying to pull itself away from having the end users do everything themselves, and moving to an "a la carte" style of computing.

Joe_diGriz:And in the latest step, EA is disabling some (non-critical) features to reduce the load

"This includes various improvements and also disables a few non-critical gameplay features (leaderboards, achievements and region filters). Disabling these features will in no way affect your core gameplay experience."

So... it's not going to fix anything?

/I'm actually enjoying the game and haven't had nearly as many problems with the servers as it sounds like others have been having.//not saying there aren't any problems, just that I haven't experienced them enough to make me upset

Duke Phillips' Singing Bears:Space Station Wagon: I work for a major player in the world of Computing and their vision is that enterprise business will be 100% cloud based with in 5 to 10 years.

That seems so bizarre to me. We're getting to the point where your average desktop has some SERIOUS horsepower, so what we're going to do is offload most of the serious calculations to a remote location and make BANDWIDTH (the one thing that is still relatively expensive and in far shorter supply than raw computing power) the limiting factor?

It's f*cking dumb.

It'll go the other way again. This is all just about inserting middle men and money from a 30k foot view. There are absolutely good reasons using the internet as a storage and computing arena makes sense, just keep in mind that all the companies pushing it are not doing so for the consumer's benefit. They're doing it to get a large slice of the middle of the pie.

Some companies (in the US) are already reversing physical outsourcing of labor. I also see some bringing back in-house various applications that someone sold them a bill of goods on about how it will be cheaper to have a third party run. It didn't work out.

I'm going to play devil's advocate and point out that it costs a lot of money to deploy and maintain servers, and release day/week is likely going to be the most fantastically busy period in the lifetime of the game, and it probably doesn't make financial sense to build out for that situation. I don't know about game servers, but in a normal data center you can have bursty internet traffic that consumes 5-6 times the average load. It's simply not cost effective to build out your transmission capacity to handle that much traffic when 5/6 of your capacity isn't utilized 99% of the time.

Likewise, it's not going to make financial sense for a company to build out a ton of servers just for release day when 99% of the product lifecycle can be handled with substantially less. As a result, they don't spend the money, and people have problems for the first week or so until the product use normalizes.

It seems like they should really have a better way of dealing with this, though. One idea would be to have a rolling release date, where people who pre-order early get access to the game before others, and divide the release date over a week or so, they could even charge an extra few dollars for an early release time.

tom baker's scarf:It was cool though. The game was more than worth it and in those days the manuals came with all kinds of other information. The manual kept me occupied for a couple of days.

I miss those manuals. That really helped add to the experience of the game when it was well written and held your interest. I remember some manuals for historical strategy games that were half well written history book and half game manual.

tom baker's scarf:The game was more than worth it and in those days the manuals came with all kinds of other information. The manual kept me occupied for a couple of days.

I still have tie fighter on 3.5, the box and all. The instruction manual has the names of Star Destroyers in the lower corners of the pages and every so often when you launched the game it would ask for the name on page _That is about the perfect amount of rights management :)

Space Station Wagon:tom baker's scarf: The game was more than worth it and in those days the manuals came with all kinds of other information. The manual kept me occupied for a couple of days.

I still have tie fighter on 3.5, the box and all. The instruction manual has the names of Star Destroyers in the lower corners of the pages and every so often when you launched the game it would ask for the name on page _That is about the perfect amount of rights management :)

By god, the Stele Chronicles should be stronger canon than the prequels.

Oh, and I fell in love with the A-10 tank killer forever based on the manual.

Fubini:Likewise, it's not going to make financial sense for a company to build out a ton of servers just for release day when 99% of the product lifecycle can be handled with substantially less. As a result, they don't spend the money, and people have problems for the first week or so until the product use normalizes.

How about using spare "release-day" servers (or borrow cycles from other servers/farms they run) to handle what they know will be an increased load in Weeks 1-4, the decommissioning them for use in the next release?

Again, it's not like EA had no idea that they'd be hammered by traffic. Plan for it, or risk...this.

tillerman35:RoxtarRyan: Why would anyone pay $60 to rent a game? It is only as good as the jackasses who run the servers (and damn near every launch of an "always on" game has shown the people who run them are quite incapable of doing their jobs), and they can shut them off anytime they want to for any reason.

That's why I never bought Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, this game, or any other POS like that. Maybe one day companies like Blizzard and EA will learn, but only after they get their headquarters burned to the ground because the servers got hacked or whatever else and people couldn't play their shiat.

Amen. If it's essentially a single-user game or a game that can have multi-user via local lans (or vlans), but they throw in that stupid always-on crap, I won't buy it. Despite being smack in the center of their target demographic (likes gaming, has time to spend on gaming, has money to spend on games, and has an understanding spouse who doesn't get on his case about gaming).

yep, and it pisses me right the hell off. SC was one of my favorite games back in the 90s, and I really wanted to try SC2. But I won't, because I will not buy into their controlling bullshiat. Same goes for Diablo3.

Copperbelly watersnake:If EA or Activision buy Bethesda, I think I will just call it quits on video games. I have a good group of friends for board games and tabletop gaming so no big loss.

Completely agreed... I just got back into Skyrim after installing some appearance mods and finishing up on some tweaks of my own to the perk and magic system. It's like a whole new game and I'm enjoying it all over again, but if one of those two bought the rights to it you can be sure that would all be coming to an end.

Theaetetus:As a result of all of the negative reviews of SimCity, I picked up Cities XL 2012 yesterday. Not bad. Huge maps, single player but you can tie your cities together and trade between them, curved roads. So suck it, EA.

sammyk:ha-ha-guy: sammyk: You would think EA would know how to do this by now. Seriously. How many on line games do they have in their library? There ready is no excuse

Even Blizzard farked this up when they launched SC2 and Diablo 3. The guys who ran a computing infrastructure for 13 million WoW players still managed to fark it up. Doesn't exactly give me confidence in the general concept.

I was really thinking about buying this until I saw over 600 one star reviews on Amazon in the first day

Same here. 1-stars currently up to 87.5% of votes, 800+. I can't recall ever seeing a product on Amazon rated that badly.

No kididng. Gamers are such farking lemmings. Keep rewarding companies like EA for dicking you over and they're just going to keep treating you like this.

No sympathy.

Not that I would buy it or condone buying it, but I can see the conundrum. Because you are buying the whole package and decisions are made based on sales. So if you absolutely love sim city and the game itself is great you aren't really doing yourself as much of a favor as you think by protest-passing on this title. Because maybe the next one won't have always online because of bad sales, or maybe there just won't be a next one at all because of bad sales. Which behavior (the launch debacle/drm crap or the game design itself) are you rewarding or punishing with your purchase (or lack of)?

Fubini:I'm going to play devil's advocate and point out that it costs a lot of money to deploy and maintain servers, and release day/week is likely going to be the most fantastically busy period in the lifetime of the game, and it probably doesn't make financial sense to build out for that situation. I don't know about game servers, but in a normal data center you can have bursty internet traffic that consumes 5-6 times the average load. It's simply not cost effective to build out your transmission capacity to handle that much traffic when 5/6 of your capacity isn't utilized 99% of the time.

Likewise, it's not going to make financial sense for a company to build out a ton of servers just for release day when 99% of the product lifecycle can be handled with substantially less. As a result, they don't spend the money, and people have problems for the first week or so until the product use normalizes.

It seems like they should really have a better way of dealing with this, though. One idea would be to have a rolling release date, where people who pre-order early get access to the game before others, and divide the release date over a week or so, they could even charge an extra few dollars for an early release time.

Or make the single-player portion offline, and bypass all that. This online-only function is just another attempt to force the customer into what they think they want, there's no customer value in having to log in to an online server to access your sandbox city that's stored in the cloud.

CPennypacker:Not that I would buy it or condone buying it, but I can see the conundrum. Because you are buying the whole package and decisions are made based on sales. So if you absolutely love sim city and the game itself is great you aren't really doing yourself as much of a favor as you think by protest-passing on this title. Because maybe the next one won't have always online because of bad sales, or maybe there just won't be a next one at all because of bad sales. Which behavior (the launch debacle/drm crap or the game design itself) are you rewarding or punishing with your purchase (or lack of)?

The customers are making it vocally obvious what they're upset about. The problem is EA has a habit of assuming poor sales mean the franchise went stale, instead of taking a step back and realizing it's their involvement that results in fewer sales.

CPennypacker:Old enough to know better: lucksi: It's sad to see that they still sold so many copies of this DRM ridden crapfest of a game

No kididng. Gamers are such farking lemmings. Keep rewarding companies like EA for dicking you over and they're just going to keep treating you like this.

No sympathy.

Not that I would buy it or condone buying it, but I can see the conundrum. Because you are buying the whole package and decisions are made based on sales. So if you absolutely love sim city and the game itself is great you aren't really doing yourself as much of a favor as you think by protest-passing on this title. Because maybe the next one won't have always online because of bad sales, or maybe there just won't be a next one at all because of bad sales. Which behavior (the launch debacle/drm crap or the game design itself) are you rewarding or punishing with your purchase (or lack of)?

So in other words, gamers should just shutup and buy whatever shiatfest the studios decide to throw at them, because, if they don't, there might not be a next time? Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

StrangeQ:CPennypacker: Old enough to know better: lucksi: It's sad to see that they still sold so many copies of this DRM ridden crapfest of a game

No kididng. Gamers are such farking lemmings. Keep rewarding companies like EA for dicking you over and they're just going to keep treating you like this.

No sympathy.

Not that I would buy it or condone buying it, but I can see the conundrum. Because you are buying the whole package and decisions are made based on sales. So if you absolutely love sim city and the game itself is great you aren't really doing yourself as much of a favor as you think by protest-passing on this title. Because maybe the next one won't have always online because of bad sales, or maybe there just won't be a next one at all because of bad sales. Which behavior (the launch debacle/drm crap or the game design itself) are you rewarding or punishing with your purchase (or lack of)?

So in other words, gamers should just shutup and buy whatever shiatfest the studios decide to throw at them, because, if they don't, there might not be a next time? Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

No fido, calm down. All I meant was gamers aren't total dipshiats if they buy it because the DRM that sucks isn't the product they are paying for, it is a shiatty aspect of it.

scottydoesntknow:CPennypacker: Not that I would buy it or condone buying it, but I can see the conundrum. Because you are buying the whole package and decisions are made based on sales. So if you absolutely love sim city and the game itself is great you aren't really doing yourself as much of a favor as you think by protest-passing on this title. Because maybe the next one won't have always online because of bad sales, or maybe there just won't be a next one at all because of bad sales. Which behavior (the launch debacle/drm crap or the game design itself) are you rewarding or punishing with your purchase (or lack of)?

The customers are making it vocally obvious what they're upset about. The problem is EA has a habit of assuming poor sales mean the franchise went stale, instead of taking a step back and realizing it's their involvement that results in fewer sales.

MindStalker:scottydoesntknow: "Due to the high demand for SimCity, Origin has experienced some delays that have impacted a small percentage of users. The team has been working non-stop to resolve. We are also making changes to prevent further issues, and we're confident that the Origin service will be stable for our International SimCity launches later this week."

I hate this farking excuse. Every time this happens they basically blame the fans. "If so many of y'all hadn't purchased it, everything would be working fine." Pre-orders alone should've given them some clue it was going to be big.

Even the game's solo, private sandbox mode requires an online connection, which many critics see as EA's attempt to bake anti-piracy digital rights management (DRM) into the game, even as EA designers have maintained that the always-online requirement is more of a design choice that persistently connects fans to a global SimCity marketplace and to new game-wide challenges.

You go to hell EA. You got to hell and you die!

Lots of the game is handled on the servers. The servers do most of the simulation calculations. I can imagine that if people play this enough they may actually cost EA more in servers than they get per customers. They will either cut the servers early pissing off lots of customers, or they will release a true single player mode.

Fubini:I'm going to play devil's advocate and point out that it costs a lot of money to deploy and maintain servers, and release day/week is likely going to be the most fantastically busy period in the lifetime of the game, and it probably doesn't make financial sense to build out for that situation. I don't know about game servers, but in a normal data center you can have bursty internet traffic that consumes 5-6 times the average load. It's simply not cost effective to build out your transmission capacity to handle that much traffic when 5/6 of your capacity isn't utilized 99% of the time.

Likewise, it's not going to make financial sense for a company to build out a ton of servers just for release day when 99% of the product lifecycle can be handled with substantially less. As a result, they don't spend the money, and people have problems for the first week or so until the product use normalizes.

It seems like they should really have a better way of dealing with this, though. One idea would be to have a rolling release date, where people who pre-order early get access to the game before others, and divide the release date over a week or so, they could even charge an extra few dollars for an early release time.

They could shell out some money and rent extra servers until the peak load subsides.

Seriously, it is a bit funny! Most folks had their first real home experience with the internet through AOL.. people generally didn't use the "world wide web" to interact online, meaning, typing in web pages and the like. They logged in, and if they wanted to look up sports stuff, they clicked on the little 'sports' icon, or go shopping, click on the 'shopping' icon. It was extremely packed up, with little for the user to worry about. No tinkering with proxies, worrying about site security certificates, secure HTTP sites or anything else. We're heading back to that, and quite quickly. Looking at one of the most popular forms of computing now, mobile computing, there isn't any more "I'm going to go www.facebook.com, have it remember my username/password, etc. etc.". Now, you just have one little interface that interacts for you. With the move to Windows 8, it looks like MS is really pushing that "packaged" experience, minimizing what you have to do to get to the content you want, and make it as straightfoward as possible. The Metro UI is essentially a mobile UI on a desktop, making things easier for people who aren't savvy to just get to facebook, launch netflix, or check out the latest sports scores.

Now, in terms of mobile computing and your average user, this is a good thing... Less things to mess with, less things that can go wrong, and minimize how many keystrokes or icons you have to hit. For a full-fledged computer user, working on an actual machine, someone who enjoys cutting their own steaks rather than having someone cut them for you, it is a bit of an annoyance.